prosthetic knowledge
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Drawing With Computers
The Artist’s Guide To Computer Graphics
1985 book by Mark Wilson scanned + PDF freely available from the author, with interesting examples of computer graphic history.
You can download it here
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The Art of Projection Mapping: John Ensor Parker at TEDx NYU Poly
Interesting 15 minute video discusses, from an artist’s point of view, a brief history of technology, art, and culture, and how that leads into the practice of Projection Mapping. Video embedded below:
As our knowledge of the natural world exponentially increases, so does our perception of reality. Scientific and Technological developments affect us as individuals and as a collective species. At TEDxNYU Poly, John Ensor Parker discusses how the art media of projection mapping can be used to generate needed dialogue on the topic.
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The 20th Anniversary of the SMS Text Message
20 years ago today, the first text message was sent by an engineer: “Merry Christmas”.
At BBC News, an interview is presented in text message format with Matti Makkonen, a Finnish Civil Servant who came up with the original idea. You can read the interview here
Also, why SMS messages are 160 characters long? Via The LA Times:
Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.
As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.
That became Hillebrand’s magic number — and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.
“This is perfectly sufficient,” he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. “Perfectly sufficient.”
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Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks - Kinect Genealogy - A Brief History of Gestural Interfaces
To commemorate the upcoming second anniversary of the release of Microsoft’s Kinect, a device which changed interactive art, I take a look at other examples of creative gestural interfaces from the 1960’s to the 1990’s, plus more.
You can see the entire piece at Rhizome here
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Computer Graphics & Art 1976 - GitHub + Processing
This just caught my eye - Kyle McDonald has set up a GitHub project to recreate programs from a 1976 periodical which I covered for Rhizome:
who wants to port everything in computer graphics & art (1976-1978) to processing? github.com/kylemcdonald/C… distributed conservation hackathon?
— Kyle McDonald (@kcimc) October 20, 2012You can find out more at the GitHub page here
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1980’s AT&T Training Video
At the 5 minute mark of this video, network engineer Rob Webner was accurately prescient on the future of network services, including working at home, pay-per-view entertainment, online gaming. This was at a time the internet we know today wasn’t invented, and here the concept of electrical network technology was titled ‘The Local Exchange’
Weber was the inventor of the technology that led to, among other things, 800 toll-free numbers. While that is what he was most known for, his facility with understanding the network led him to theorize about what applications would become popular. In this film he focuses on gaming—interactive video games over the phone lines—and other forms of entertainment. He’s pretty spot-on in his predictions. Weber had over 60 patents from his work at Bell Labs and later at AT&T Labs, where he was Research Director.
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How Computer-Generated Animations Were Made, Circa 1964
Interesting computer-made presentation demonstrating the earlier concepts of computer graphics. It is 15 minutes long, silent, and very slow moving, but from a digital literacy perspective, essential watching:
This film explains how the computer scientists and mathematicians at Bell Labs created early computer graphics films, like most (though not all) of these films, made by Bell Labs employees E.E. Zajac, A. Michael Noll, Ken Knowlton, Frank Sinden, and many others.
This film, A Computer Technique For the Production of Animated Movies, from 1964, gives the basics on the process, from Ken Knowlton’s BEFLIX programming language for a raster-scan (bitmap) output, to the hardware details (IBM 7094 mainframe, Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm printer). -
Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: CurAudio / DocuMP3
A collection of audio content from the Prosthetic Knowledge Tumblr archive and around the web.
Featuring a 2004 talk from Notcon called “100 Years of the Computer Artscene”, DJ Food’s documentary-in-mixtape-form “Raiding The 20th Century”, Delia Derbyshire’s “Dreams” which feature narrations of peoples dreams with her unique audio style, and “Antique Electronic / Synthesizer Greats 1955 - 1984 Part 1” by Fluorescent Grey, a mix of electronic music created between that period, cut-up, and reconstructed into something contemporary.
You can check all of this out at Rhizome here
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Paintings of Kristoffer Zetterstrand
Artist whose work (since 2002) combines space, perspective, historical fine art and the presentation of video games:
I work with painting. For some years I have experimented with virtual still lifes, often in the form of stage design in which I explore how two-dimensionality (and painting) relates to computer-generated 3D worlds. I am interested in visual spaces created online, in computer games and 3D programmes, and especially in what happens when the illusion is shattered and the underlying construction emerges -like when there is a bug in a computer game. I am interested in visual failures, which I try to use in my painting. Among other things, I have produced paintings based on the landscapes that you can see only if you are “dead” in the online game Counter-Strike, and paintings with motifs created by crashed landscape generators used in film and computer game production. Presently my work process is like this: I start by sketching the motif in 3D on the computer, where I can move the scene about, rearrange pictorial elements, redirect the light, reposition the camera, and so on. I sculpt the architecture and the various parts of the environment and dress the parts in different textures, which I often sample from images of my own earlier paintings, from pictures I have found on the net and screen dumps from computer games. I also use a lot of material from my art archives, which comprises some sixty-thousand paintings. While working with a sketch on the computer, the simpleness of the tools means that I can follow my impulses and try out new angles, change backdrops and pictorial elements, redirect the light, rearrange the shadows, etc. For me, the 3D programme is a tool that I use intuitively when I construct my motifs. The scenes are often influenced by the dramatic composition of computer games, where familiarity with some kind of mythology is essential in order to play the game, in a similar way as an artist relates to art history. That the end result is painting is a prerequisite of my work. The physical aspect of painting and the space it allows for improvisation and painterly reformulations of the motifs are the most important parts of the process. You could say that when it comes to the painterly part of my work process, I improvise on a theme that I have determined on the computer.
Artist’s website here
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ROM
Kickstarter project to fund a new publisher of high-end design books of videogame history, debuting with a book on the great Sensible Software:
Sensible Software 1986–1999 from Darren Wall on Vimeo.
The definitive biography of Sensible Software, one of the world’s most pioneering and best-loved games companies, and the flagship title for Read-Only Memory, a new publishing company specialising in high-quality video game products.
Sensible Software 1986–1999 will tell the story of Sensible through interviews and anecdotes from those who were there – including Jon Hare and the Sensible team – and a feast of visuals celebrating the company’s idiosyncratic, groundbreaking style.
With your support, we want to publish the ultimate retrospective; immaculately designed and brilliantly written.
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Commercial Breaks
Sad to hear about the closure of one of the longest running video game houses in the UK, Sony Liverpool. They maybe best known for bringing the Wipeout futuristic game franchise to the Playstation (and with it, a taste of what 21st century aesthetics would become), but the company took many forms before that …
Before Sony, it was Psygnosis, who specialised in games during the 16 Bit home computer era, best known for Shadow Of The Beast and Lemmings. Lemmings was created by (at the time) DMA Design, released by Psygnosis. DMA Design were responsible for the Grand Theft Auto franchise (and became Rockstar North, who do the hard coding).
Before Psygnosis, they were Imagine, who made games in the UK for 8 Bit home computers. In the video above, the company (alongside their rival, Ocean) were featured in an half-hour long documentary following the build up to their christmas releases.
Imagine went bankrupt during the making of the documentary, and there are plenty of fly-on-the-wall scenes captured during this period - it isn’t the first time things have gone wrong for those behind the company.
More about Psygnosis can be found here
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Hypercube
Computer animation from 1965 demonstrating the concept of the 4D ‘Hypercube’, which could be viewed as a stereogram - video embedded below:
From AT&T Archives:
Two of the earliest three-dimensional computer graphics films. The films’ creator, A. Michael Noll, programmed the computer (most of this work in the Labs was done on an IBM 7094) to generate the correct stereoscopic imagery, and these images were printed side-by-side, frame by frame. They’re intended for freeviewing in 3D — i.e. the three-dimensional image is created when one views the film while cross-eyed — no special devices required. Of course, the time/movement elements bring the film into the fourth dimension.
More info here
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McKnight Artist Fellows: Visualizing Artists’ Careers
Visualizing data from artist’s careers (publications, exhibitions, years etc) into animated information visualizations:
In the 30th year of the McKnight Artist Fellowship program, we wanted to see what the artists had been up to. We used data from résumés to create diagrams showing the professional histories of 120 amazing artists, each one as distinct as the individual artists’ careers.
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The Rosetta Disk
Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project have created a miniature archive featuring all of the world languages laser etched onto a small disc that can fit in your hand:
The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.
The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’
… The pages are microscopically etched and then electroformed in solid nickel, a process that raises the text very slightly - about 100 nanometers - off of the surface of the disk. Each page is only 400 microns across - about the width of 5 human hairs - and can be read through a microscope at 650X as clearly as you would from print in a book. Individual pages are visible at a much lower magnification of 100X. The outer ring of text reads “Languages of the World” in eight major world languages.
Here is a video by Scott Oller about the Rosetta Project:
Rosetta from Scott Oller on Vimeo.
You can find out more about the project here
